Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday February 26, 2010 @03:42AM
from the in-other-words-always dept.

A post up at Gamasutra complains about the lack of effort put into the PC ports of some console games. The author picks on the unimpressively-reviewed Ninja Blade in particular: "Just as a quick guide to what we're dealing with here: when you create a new save file at the start of Ninja Blade on the PC, it warns you not to 'turn off your console.' Yes, Ninja Blade is one of those conversions: not so much converted as made to perfunctorily run on a different machine. In-game, you're asked to press A, B, X and Y in various sequences as part of Ninja Blade's extraordinary abundance of quick-time events. Whether you have an Xbox 360 pad plugged in or not, the game captions these button icons with text describing the PC equivalent controls. Only it doesn't always do that. Sometimes, you're left staring at a giant, pulsating, green letter A, and no idea what to do with it." What awful ports have you had the misfortune to experience?

If you really want to see poor translations, see the free-to-play MMO "fiesta". The mission text and the monster names were translated independently, I think, with the results that in many cases they just don't tie up in the slightest...

I'm really shocked Borderlands wasn't included in the original article. Someone in another forum posted "i heard they finally fixed borderlands so you can play without unblocking 200 ports" - the response he got back was less than kind and more than happy to correct him. Great game, greater still with mutiplayer, but completely ruined when you can't play with three of your best pals. Also, lol @ gamespy as a matchmaking service. I felt like I'd traveled back to 1999.

In other news, the vestigial xbox360 code for L4D1 allowed you to play the PC version split screen with a friend, playing as player2 using a xbox360-come-USB controller and some well timed console commands.

Stories like this and the Slashdot summary are why I made an attempt at PC gaming in the 90s, but then quit. Computer gaming was fun in the era of Atari 800s, Commodore 64s, Atari STs, and Commodore Amigas, because you had FIXED hardware that just worked (and worked extremely well - better than the PCs/Macs). No need to mess with drivers or cards or other nonsense. Gaming on those old 8/32 bit machines was plug-and-play easy.

Computers are no longer that easy to use, so I bought my first console ever with the PS2 and Gamecube. Where PC gaming had been a major headache, the consoles once again returned the simplicity that I experienced with my Commodores and Amigas. Plug and play. No headaches.

Between this, bad DRM, horrible optimization in a lot of console-to-PC ports and the fact that exclusives tend to be designed to run on hypothetical future computers from the year 2101, it's no wonder PC gaming is dying(as confirmed by Netcraft).

and the fact that exclusives tend to be designed to run on hypothetical future computers from the year 2101

You'll have to give a citation, please.

And I'm not talking about your hyperbole of "from the year 2101", but just your assertion that "exclusives tend to be designed" for computers other than those that are readily available for say, under $1000.

Games like Eve Online, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series and others show that PC gaming is not dying. I'll go out on a limb and say that more people are playing computer g

Even worse, the camera was locked sometimes which made mouse+keyboard controls near-unplayable.

Ubisoft are the masters of getting 90% of a game right and then fucking up the remaining 10% so badly that you can't in good conscience recommend their games. But that's not restricted to their PC games.

GUI related nonsense also comes in games like Borderlands. Doubly aggravating because the developer claims to have optimized the game's GUI for the PC version yet controlling it with the mouse is extremely clunky. Meanwhile something like Section 8 uses the same GUI on PC and console and it works fine on both.

Jade Empire, Mass Effect 1, Dragon Age, Mass Effect 2 are four that don't seem to suffer from the specific problems cited above at the time I write this.(i.e. bad translation of controls). I don't much like the minigames in ME1, but that's not a console issue.

Fable was fine IIRC. Fahrenheit -- didn't like the control schema, but it was translated properly to PC IIRC.

That's your half dozen right there, and just off the top of my head. (Granted, a lot are from Bioware). The problem isn't universal; some developers and publishers seem to care about doing a decent port and some don't.

What? Mass Effect 2 is horrible in this, especially the UI of your journal and saving and the like. All list-like displays (save files, journal entries) disallow double-clicks, instead forcing you to press some disconnected button to open something. The codex list (a tree-like structure) is worst, something probably working smoothly with sticks and buttons (usually an intuitive affair of 'entering and leaving' with two buttons), but horribly bewildering with a mouse. Weapon loadout choosing actually doesn't even make sense.

Don't get me wrong, love the game, and maybe its GUI is bad on console as well, in which case, port successful!

Which works great when developers support it, like Fallout 3 (where connecting the controller changes the UI automatically).
Not so great for Mass Effect/Mass Effect 2, where they give the bird to gamepad users.

It can be almost replicated if you bind "action" to two different keys, whatever you used for Action and Crouch (Enter and Right Control for me). No way to triple-bind, so you have to mentally move the run key, but better than before.:)

Mass effect 1 had horrible inventory management on the PC (i.e. still had the 150 item limit, when it should have had effectively infinite) A small adjustment to the amount of items you could carry would have fixed that, oh and a stash/chest ala Diablo 2 (a 10 year old game almost now I think) could have at least gone a long way to prevent inventory hell.

Let's not also forget the convoluted shop interfaces when compared even against console many supremely old RPG's (we're talking 20 years here). It's sad when a game from 1992 (FF4) has better inventory then a game in 2007'ish (mass effect 1).

ME2 did also suffer from console-itis by REMOVING instead of fixing the item system from mass effect 1, they turned ME2 into gears of war now in teh mass effect universe, lets face this fact please.

It was so obvious the game was gears of war reskinned/w slight modifications. There ar etonnes of issues with ports, Mass effect 2 made up for their lack of deeper game options with a comitment to story, cinematics and simple shooter action because they weren't up to the job of a full RPG, and they wanted to hit the mass market of drooling first person/third person shooter fanboys.

Why should Mass Effect have had an infinite inventory? They could have easily had that on consoles; it was a game design limitation, not a game machine limitation Your cited Diablo II is a hell of a lot worse for inventory hell even with the stash, though, so I think you're just confused.;)

Mass Effect 1 came out on XBox360 first and the PC port wasn't even done by Bioware, Mass Effect 2 came out on both systems at the same time.

That aside Bioware so far has been doing great on porting consoles to PC or visa versa, as they actually redesign the user interface for each system, instead of just mapping mouse moving to an analog stick, which never really works.

Mirror's edge is a fantastic game with good controls on PC, but the interface was poorly ported from consoles. The tutorials kept directing me to press Xbox 360 controller buttons even though I don't own that gamepad, so I had to hit escape to look at the key mappings about a dozen times. It's really frustrating when you're told to press "A" (not "the A button" but just "A"), so I do, and nothing happens because it's actually referring to a controller button which happens to be mapped to the shift key..

Please show me a single port of console game to pc, which didn't show these problems.... in over 20 years i believe its less than half a dozen

Even quite successful series like gta suffer from these mistakes

I've played original GTA on PC (both DOS and Windows versions) quite extensively, and can't say I've seen such problems. Maybe the more recent titles in the series had them, but the original really didn't.

Despite the fact Halo is to xbox that Mario is to Nintendo, the pc port was very good. I only played the game on a pc, and although it needed a much more poweful pc than the xbox's 733mhz it never felt like a port. Controls worked well with keyboard and mouse IMHO.

... on PC requires a "crysis ready" machine.Will not run properly on a P4 2.8 + Radeon X1950 pro, runs ok on a C2D + radeon 47something.No way to turn off the background animations, menu navigation is extremely slow, the game seems to be a console version running in a console emulator...

GH3 barely ran on my previous pc (athlon 3500, 1Gb ram, gefroce 6800). But with a now modern pc i'd assume that it works perfectlyand no controller issues since you'd probably buy the guitar with it ^^

Yes! Why on earth does it work like that? I try to plug a USB cable in, but it doesn't feel like it wants to go, so I invert it, and it still won't go. Then I frown and look down the end of the cable, decide once more upon the proper orientation, and whoosh, it fits.

The PC port of Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance was not bad, it was horrible!
You had to map the keyboard/mouse/joystick to the Playstation 2 buttons via a config tool. I also never got the graphics to display correctly.

Finally someone else understands my pain, I thought I was the only guy gullible enough to try and play that.

I have actually had an easier time mapping mechwarrior to keyboard and mouse controls than I did Substance. Trying to bind dual joysticks AND 8 PRESSURE SENSITIVE buttons to a keyboard just isn't possible, even if you manage to get one of the expensive keyboards that CAN press that many keys at once you'll still run out of fingers.

When Gears of War's PC port was first released, it was:1) buggy2) crashy3) released A YEAR LATER than the xbox versionThe crashy part was fixed, iirc about 2 months after release by a patch.As you can imagine, the sales for this port were a little slow. Video game companies being video game companies chalked this up to piracy. To them the fact that the game was a shitty port released a full year after the original with dated graphics and all couldn't have POSSIBLY been a reason.

When time comes around to release Gears of War 2 - cliffyB says there's no plans for a port because the first one was just pirated too much...

Uh, GTA IV is a perfect example of an utter clusterfuck of a PC port; buggy, slow and it attempted to assrape you with DRM, without even taking you to dinner and a show first. If Rockstar is better, who's worse?

Not sure what all you guys have against GTA IV on PC. Aside the fact that it takes like 15 minutes to start the game because you have to create accounts in Game for Windows, update Game for Windows etc. it runs quite well and I never had any bug or isssue.

Of course, you needed a decent gaming machine for the time.

It's like saying Doom 3 is a pile of sh** because about nobody could run it correctly at the time of release.

Note that I'm not arguing that they couldn't have made a better port, it's just that I

I loved it that at one point in the game to go on, you had to edit the registry to tell the game to look for the game data in a directory on your drive drive and not on the CD, then replace one of the video files so you were able to continue on with the game. This was the solution listed on the Eidos support site.

It is also great that the minigames were cpu cycle timed instead of actual time. Trying to replay it a few years later on a faster computer, it is impossible to play any of the minigames because th

If you want to play Final Fantasy VII on a modern PC, don't even bother looking at the PC version - it was a bumpy ride even back when it was new, let alone with modern hardware and operating systems. Buy a copy of the Playstation version (can be found very cheap second hand) and grab ePSXe (or your emulator of choice). The same goes for Final Fantasy VIII. You'll get better, more configurable graphics, fewer bugs and a few useful (if slightly cheaty) extra features like fast-forward and a save-anywhere option.

Alternatively, VII and VIII are available on the Playstation Network for a few dollars each which gets you an electronic copy portable between the PS3 and PSP (though this is probably still less "nice" than playing the original version emulated).

Back in the day, whether or not you had problems with Final Fantasy VII on PC was largely down to your PC's setup. Some systems would get along fine with it, others wouldn't (whether or not you had a Glide-supporting card was a big factor). However, as time went on and PC hardware and operating systems moved on, running the PC version became harder and harder.

Modern PS1 emulators essentially invalidate most of the old PC version; you can bump the resolution up as far as your graphics card and monitor will s

I think the worst example has to be Ghostbusters. The console versions are fairly good and somewhat quirky, if ultimately flawed, third person shooters. The PC version is actually broken. As in, it can't even reasonably be described as "working". If you want to install to a drive other than c:\ you're out of luck. If you have anything other than "generic Windows sound card" drivers installed, you won't be hearing any voices in-game. And some of the early fights are essentially unbeatable without cheating, due to collision detection and clipping issues. Oh, and it does the whole "console controller analogues" thing.

There are plenty of other awful examples. The Prince of Persia reboots have been mentioned (justly so) and I think the more recent installments in the Tomb Raider franchise also deserve a mention. Last Remnant is another good example; Square-Enix titles have never been particularly kindly treated on the PC anyway. Fire one of these up on even a top end PC with an Xbox controller plugged in and it's still very much apparent that you're playing the "second best" version of the game.

That said, there are plenty of decent ports out there. While I know others disagreed, Fallout 3 felt pretty good to me on the PC. Mass Effect 2 likewise feels as though they've spent a lot of time optimising the PC version so that it feels at home on the platform. In fact, there are even a few cases where it is the console version that feels like a nasty port. Pretty much any RTS that makes it onto the consoles can be chalked up in that category. The recent AvP game looks and feels far better on the PC than on the consoles; the Predator is an over-complicated nightmare to control on any platform, but the PC version does work out somewhat less toxic.

Most games I can think of that got ported from console to PC, suffers from a lot of issues.

They all have one or more in common:

- Lack of configuration
- Extremely high hardware requirements
- Bad mouse control (acceleration, non-configurable sensitivity etc) Example: Mass Effect 2 got THREE settings for mouse. And it's STILL very high on Low.
- Low FOV
- Difficulty setting too low for PC (it's easier when you actually have a mouse to aim with in FPS)

But these issues are usually something that can get patched eventually.The most annoying thing about ports is this:

They usually make a direct port of the game. What works on console, DOES NOT ALWAYS WORK ON PC!On PC, I got an entire keyboard of keys. Allow me to freaking bind actions to em, don't give me 3 "command wheels" or whatever.

Don't make me "tap" a button to perform a action. Who thought of that?

I can go on with numerous game design issues, but I think everyone gets my points here.When porting a game to PC, there are certain elements you just have to redesign.

Oh, I fully agree. Mass Effect dialog wheels don't seem to be affected by mouse sensitivity. I have my sensitivity set quite high - about 5x the maximum the UI allows - because I don't have much room to move my mouse around. Navigating through dialog options is a tad annoying.

The hardware requirements of most games are pretty moderate, I have yet to play one game except Crysis which does not run perfectly fluid on my PC with a 80$ NVidia GT, the problem is that most people have shoddy intel integrated graphics controllers in their games, while the consoles have processors 5 times as slow as intels normal above atom offerings, the graphics controllers are 5 times as fast as the ones Intel provides but still way slower than the current bunch of low range cards from ATI and NVidia.

Prototype is a fun game -- it's got a story line, but you can free-roam and do missions like the Grand Theft Auto series (but with superpowers instead of cars).

But... It's obviously a console port.

Most of your actions are based on combos that would be fine with a gamepad, but it kind of breaks down with a keyboard and mouse. I always find myself doing the wrong action because it's hard to chord the correct command for what you want.

The mouse is a really effective way to control things -- except with this

I remember playing Megaman X for PC and I was pretty impressed with how well adapted it was to the keyboard. It did away with the whole 16-digit code system of "saving," and in lieu there were actual saved games. Controls were pretty easily changeable (though I used the same setup I do for SNES emus that I normally use. That being said, I've played a couple of the latter PC ports of MMX series and they were ok, though not much different from the original. So I guess I would say that Capcom had the dualism d

THANK YOU! I was reading all these posts thinking "was I the only one that tried assassins creed on pc?". Game was awful, there's no way to save and it doesn't explain that anywhere. There's no menu to escape out to either which made it more frustrating. Judging from the increase in horrible ports to pc I'm wondering if someday all the "good" games won't be on consoles, seems with the more powerful consoles and strict antipiracy (how long did it take them to hack ps3? 4 yrs?) it seems devs don't want to

It also had (as I recall) the typical you-can-only-save-when-we-say-so console conversion issues
Would you rather have had NetHack-style the-game-is-saved-continuously-even-when-you-die save mechanics?

Starting out with more bugs than a jungle, and the only patches available being on gamecopyworld.comAnd then having up to 3 seconds of input lag (time between pressing a key, and the car reacting).

But only when you saw how crappy the graphics were, and how the game was slow like a dog, did you know that it was a console port.The graphics card was irrelevant. The only thing that counter, was if you had more than 2 cores.Because apparently, they implemented the PS3 vector processors in the CPU, instead of the vastly more powerful graphics cards.

The cracked version is same crap. It's good that I played both the retail and the cracked version before deciding on the purchase. I did not go for the PC version of the game as a result.
Now you can count me as a lost sale you f**ktards! And I am an actual LOST sale not due to piracy.

The cracked version is same crap. It's good that I played both the retail and the cracked version before deciding on the purchase. I did not go for the PC version of the game as a result.
Now you can count me as a lost sale you f**ktards! And I am an actual LOST sale not due to piracy.

PS: I will not buy the game for any platform, and played it for lono nger than 15 minutes. Nor will I actually play the game illegally.

A gamepad works great for fighting games, and the standard fixed perspective jump 'n run platform games. But it is really terrible for games where you actually have to aim. It annoys the hell out of me that I can't get the camera where I want with games like Uncharted and Brutal Legend (don't own that many console games). Gamedevs often try to be clear and compensate for this horrible input method. These clever tricks of course should be removed ASAP for the PC version, because there you have a good device

Thing is the word "port" is a misnomer. Since in development dev kits are rare and expensive so only the more senior guys get them or you have to share.

This means there is (and must) always a working PC build on the go. Yep, all console games start life as PC games, you don't code directly on the console, your in Visual studio. Also a lot of the testing is done on PC as its a hell of a lot easier to debug and for large periods of devlopment your console builds might not even be working. For instance on our AAA title the Playstation 3 build spends half of its time utterly dead. (Fyi the Playstation 3 is a terrible console and is actually less powerful than a 360, the graphics power is especially poor)

So there's no excuse for putting out a bad PC release, its just lazyness. or more likely bad producers and their corporate overlords dailing to listen to the concerns of the designers and pushing out a shoddy product.

One fo the problems also is when the art is created for the console. Art in a decent environment should be compiled together choosing correct sizes, resolutions, compressions for the platform. This often isnt done. This means that a texture that looks nice and crisp on the console will look utter pants on the pc at 1920*1080 as it will be having to upscale the mips.

What should be done is that each platform should have people responsable for it at each step of its production. That would ensure you don't end up with terrabad "ports". Try pitching that to management tho.:(

Almost no shading and piss-poor textures. They were sensible enough to release a patch for this. Patch had no bounds checking for disk space. If you had too little disk space, the installer would fail without any hint as to why.

X-box key names. Imagine having to remember what key press you mapped the X-box key to when it flashes on the screen while trying to avoid certain death by a rolling boulder.

No mouse support...

Forced 16:9 letterboxed display

Despite their hard effort (or lack thereof) to make the game piss off PC owners as much as possible, the game was still awesome.

- FOV settings, the fov is related to the distance to the viewer. On a PC, people is near the screen, so the FOV sould be higuer, is just a number, but even 90 million dollars videogames forget to change it on the PC. Out of lazyness, is not modified. (note: It may need to recompile some maps, and edit some weapons a littel).
- Stupid messages "Don't shutdown the machine"
- Savepoints, but thats parts of the mechanic, and can't be fixed
- Autoaim, thats helps pad users, because you can't properly walk and aim on a pad (seems) so need autoaim. With a mouse, you don't need autoaim. Out of lazyness, is not deactivated.
- HORRIBLE server browsers or lack of server browser. Idiot-box with a single button. Lack of dedicated servers. A whole horrible bad network experience, with not community sense and not respect to the PC values of freedom and user control of the experience.
- The game greets you with a "Press ENTER". This is a arcade saloon artifact from 1982. It has not reason at all on a PC.
- Use of bloated middleware..NET, Windows Games For Live, etc.
- Unoptimized code. Code written for the console, that runs poorly on the pc.
- Smallish maps. Since the consoles are serius ram limits (like 512 MB or less) some maps are really small, and you see lots of "load screens". On the PC proper games use streaming to have not load screens, or the maps are giganteous large.
- Quick Time Events. These things work ok with a pad, on a keyboard are something like a "learn where the A and B key are on your keyboard" minigames. Don't work at all on the PC.
- Weird resolutions. If your game don't support 1280x1024, your game is shit, cause this is a normal (low) resoultion for lots of LCD. This force people to use lower resolutions that looko blurry, and with enormo pixels.
- Lack of configuration options. The console people like FEW options, the PC people like MORE options. Add a FOV setting, and autoaim settings, a resolution setting, a bloom setting.
- Use of the UNREAL engine. This engine don't support things like AA, so you have to force AA on the driver, but it don't work on some engines. Games like Borderlands suffer of this. Unreal could be a decent engine for consoles, but is BAD for the PC, because is optimized for the consoles.

I could continue, but I am wasting my time here. since most of these problems are out of lazyness. Disabling autoaim sould take a well managed company only 1 hour of time, If people don't know you have do disable autoaim for the PC, what the hell are you doing near a "conversion to PC" proyect?

I've found that most games that play on both a console and PC/Mac suffer when your playing them on anything but a console. It's simply that when designing a game that is going to be run on the console at all your much better off playing to that lower common denominator than the other way around. Or to put it another way you will end up just having a massive kludge of a console game that was designed for the level of complexity that can be done on a real computer.

The translations of the controls from console to keyboard for various Resident Evil games was awful, especially in recent releases. Many were unplayable unless you used cheats, because you couldn't control character motion well enough in combat scenes.

The 64Mb memory of Xbox lead to room-sized levels. I had a feeling that game designers were more concerned about advertising this console graphics (oh, look, we have shaders and are not afraid to use them), than actually making a decent game. The six-button controller crippled the interface. The teenager target group lead to oversimplified gameplay (same ammo for pistol and flamethrower, WTF?) and a stupid plot (virtual Britney Spears clone is remarkable).

And despite all that, it ran really slow on my PC, which had four times more RAM and a better videocard than this X-crap.

Also, Thief 3. The original game was a masterpiece, and Thief 2 built well on its foundations.

Thief 3 was pretty, I'll give it that, but it was rendered half brain dead by being designed for console compatibility. Watered-down, simplified game play, and levels that actually had clouds of fog representing the transition point between "bit you have loaded" to "bit you need to load"; walk into one and it told you what was happening and sought confirmation.

For those unfamiliar, it's basically GTA but slightly more tongue-in-cheek, with a heavy emphasis on character customization, a la Def Jam: Fight for New York, or The Godfather. It's a blast to play. It's really one of my favorite games. Which makes it all the more bitter that THQ did such a crap-ass job of porting it.

I suspect that Ctrl and left-Shift are mapped as shoulder buttons, because that's how you scroll through the in-game menu, not with the arrow keys or the mouse. Despite having graphics that ar

I can't believe nobody mentioned Final Fantasy 8. It was running on an emulator, it even had some of the same graphics bugs that EPSXE had at the time (square hit boxes were visible on the maps). To be fair all they had to go on for FF7 was gold masters, Square deleted the original code/graphics (200 gigs was a lot back then, lol). But then What's FF8's excuse? To this day the best way to play them is running in EPSXE.

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned DMC3, the poster boy of bad console ports. Basically unplayable due to totally fucked up controls. Even if you got a PS2-like controller and the PS2 DMC3 manual so you could make some sense of the controls, there was no support for analog axes so it still played like shit. Also the graphics looked like ass and the menu navigation was extremely confusing. Overall it felt like it was running on top of an ultra-shitty emulator.

The pc port was actually pretty good, few bugs that bothered me, but one gigantic, huge, blaring flaw...

It was really really really really super easy. It was the exact same gameplay as the PS2 version (which I also owned) but mouse+keyboard is so far superior to the console, that every single gun might as well have been "the golden gun" from goldeneye. I am serious, those super hard missions where you had to take out 900 guys and you had to try 1000 times on PS2 and still you just barely pass it after breaking a controller or two.. cakewalk when you can actually aim.

The hellicopter mission, where you are taking passes on the mob base, with a tinfoil hellicopter... That mission was the bane of the ps2, finishing with more than 5% of the chopper health was a feat of god... On PC, 99% health was like oops, LOL I should not have made pizza rolls while playing that mission.

It really opened my eyes to the common notion at the time that the gap was narrowing between console fps/3ps and PC, it was just not the case. Still isn't, because a controller will never (barring comprehensive design changes, and I am not sure motion control will ever quite cut it)have enough precision and reaction.
It was really weird having a pretty nice port that was totally useless, and it really turned me off of the PS2 version, made it seem like "Nintendo hard" Hard because of gimped controlls not because of good design/creativity.

Having been personally involved in coding several of several ports mentioned in these comments, to and from a wide variety of different platforms, the way it usually works is that the publisher will outsource the development to company like the one I work for. The schedules are always very aggressive and tight so unfortunately you know what the end result of that is. It's not like we're trying to make a bad product, we do the best we can given the constraints. Personally I find the job very rewarding and fun and intellectually challenging, even if the end result isn't always that great. I get to see a lot of code from a lot of different companies and it's quite interesting. The challenge is, basically, here's a big mess of code of uncertain quality, get it to work on another platform in 6 months. I *always* give the publishers realistic timelines, which they ignore and we still wind up having to do it 6 months. The only way to get a real quality product on multiple platforms is for the original dev team to develop for all those platforms themselves, or give us enough time to do the port. A lot of times we'll get the contract a year or more after the original game has shipped, we've only occasionally be able to develop the ports simultaneous the original development.